‘A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad’

E H Carr • What is History (1961)

‘The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present’

Moderata Fonte • The Worth of Women (1600)

‘Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? Consider that these histories have been written by men'

George Orwell • 1984 (1949)

‘The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history’.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child’ [Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum]

Edward Gibbon • Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89)

‘History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’.

Eric Hobsbawm • The Age of Empire, 1875-1914

‘Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution’.

Christopher Hill • The World Turned Upside Down (1972)

‘History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past’.

Statement of the Organisation of Afro-American Unity • 1964

‘A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent; takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfil itself... ’

The historian A.J.P. Taylor declared that ‘History is not just a catalogue of events put in the right order like a railway timetable’. This is a modern way of expressing the root of the word history itself, which comes from the Greek word, historia, meaning inquiry. Herodotus, generally acknowledged as the first European historian, first used this term in the mid-fifth century BC. Before him, in Homer, a history was someone who passed judgement based on the facts as the result of an investigation. Immediately, by thinking of history as inquiry we move from simply thinking about it as the past, to asking questions of the past and therefore seeking answers. As soon as we move towards this understanding of history we are starting to think both about analysis, and how the different kinds of questions we might ask will shape the answers we can construct. Added to this, the audience for any history is important – who is this history being written for? how will read it? why will they read it? All these issues feed into not only the questions we ask of our evidence, but how we shape and present our writing of history.

At its simplest level today history is probably accepted as being an account of the past, based on evidence. This highlights how historians no longer believe there can be one single history. Instead history is seen as being made up of multiple accounts and multiple perspectives; but the importance of evidence to support that account takes history, in theory at least, out of the realm of fiction, of myth and of legend. And yet, our look at propoganda and the history of nationalisms shows just how fuzzy this line can sometimes be, and how contested the idea of truth can become.

Across the pages of the website we explore some of these ideas in more depth. We range far and wide, across time and place, sometimes zooming into the details of micro-histories, at other times exploring large-scales changes over time and across empires.

Taken together they show the richness and diversity of history both across the past and today.

How has history and the practice of history been understood in the past? What did the historians of Ancient Greece and Rome understand to be history? Did history repeat itself? Could it offer lessons for today? How did have the historians of Britain taken up these questions. And what about in the rest of Europe? What does exploring one of the key events of European history – the French Revolution – show us about the different ways in which history can be written and understood?

How does considering history at different scales affect how we write it and what questions we can ask of it? Micro-histories suggest that we need to understand the small if we wish to see the large; moving up the scale, what is the relationship between the individual in history? How have ideas of the nation affected the writing of history? What does considering the formation and running of empires allow historians to do, which smaller scale approaches cannot?

History is not only about people, it also encompasses how they have shaped their landscape, the technologies they use and the ideas and beliefs which sustain, unite and divide them. Looking at history from different angles and with different sources allows historians to construct new understandings of our past and our relationship with it today.

We might associate history with the archives, but historians use evidence of all kinds to inform their work. Eye witness accounts, stained glass, text, paint, costume, building, sculpture, cinema, broadcasting, the internet, all these provide the raw materials for historians. And not only historians, propagandists also use these mediums to spread their message and shape their world. and effect. While looking at the role of myth and memory in historical accounts allows us to explore the complex relationship between sources and history.